Robert Mitchell Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies and Faculty, Institute of Genome Sciences and Policy and Affiliated Faculty, Women's Studies
Office Location: 322 Allen Building
Office Phone: (919) 668-2547
Email Address: rmitch@duke.edu
- Office Hours:
- Thursday 1:30-2:30pm or by appointment
- Education and Interests:
- Ph.D., University of Washington
- British Literature of the Romantic Era; Romanticism; 18th Century Literature; Literature and Science
- Robert Mitchell is interested in relationships between the sciences and prose and poetry of the Romantic era, and in the role of theories of emotional communication (for example, sympathy and identification) in eighteenth-century and Romantic-era philosophy and literature. He is also interested in contemporary intersections between information technologies, genetics, and commerce, especially as these have been played out in the legal and literary spheres. He has published articles about the role of sympathy and systems in Adam Smith's moral philosophy, the vision of science in Percy Bysshe Shelley's early poetry, and Coleridge's interest in the sacrifices demanded by systems, among other topics. He has recently published a monograph entitled Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era: Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity (London: Routledge, 2007), and is co-author of Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (Duke UP, 2006). He is also co-editor of two collections of essays--Semiotic Flesh: Information and the Human Body (University of Washington Press, 2002) and Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information (Routledge, 2003)--and editor of a reprint edition of Thomas Beddoes's Hygëia (Thoemmes, 2003). Mitchell is also co-author of Biofutures: Owning Body Parts and Information, a DVD-ROM that explores contemporary biocommerce through text, video, and animations; this DVD-ROM is forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press in April 2008.
- Representative Publications
(More Publications)
- Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era: Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity. Routledge, 2007. [102-8880685-5627335]
- with C. Waldby. Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 2006. [102-8880685-5627335]
- with P. Thurtle. Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information. Routledge, Winter 2003. [104-7461896-1670304]
- "'Beings that have existence only in ye minds of men': State Finance and the Origins of the Collective Imagination." The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (2007) forthcoming
- "The Fane of Tescalipoca: S. T. Coleridge on the Sacrificial Economies of Systems in the 1790s." Studies in Romanticism 46.1 (2007): 105-27.
- "Beautiful and Orderly Systems: Adam Smith on the Aesthetics of Political Improvement." New Voices on Adam Smith. Ed. Eric Schliesser and Leonidas Montes. Routledge, 2006.
- "The Violence of Sympathy: Adam Smith on Resentment and Executions." 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (Winter, 2003)
- More Information:
- Faculty, Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (http://www.genome.duke.edu/people/faculty/mitchell) Affiliated Faculty, Women's Studies (http://www.duke.edu/womstud/index2.html)
